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Burlok is dead, its remains smouldering in ashes. Kaja the dwarven Rune Priest stands ‘tall’ and looks around. She has a choice of new homes, aside from Karak-Azgal where the evil Ailil bounces on her disk.

Ok, I’ll prob move her to Karak Eight Peaks on monday. No idea what the new guild is doing, but these days I’m more of a soloer. And it sounded like a fun server on saturday.

RP server closures are sad to me, because they offer something that you just don’t find elsewhere. But WAR demands on numbers, and equality. And the numbers are so LOW on the RP servers, that these moves are inevitable. And wherever I go, I’ll be using Flimgoblin’s awesome new RP addon.

Hrrm, the move is on the same day my 6-month sub runs out. I was going to take a few weeks break from the game and then continue playing and move any new WAR commentary to my more general blog: Nerf the Cat. Yes folks, after a new breath of life for the Age of Blogging, the Book of Grudges is most definitely coming to an end.

It shows how things have progressed in 7 months. I’ve gone from uber-excited about every announcement, to slightly cynical and needing proof of things. I gave up on end-game and enjoyed the simplicity of tiers 1 and 2, and could play those all the time! I look forward to the Land of the Dead ‘expansion’ stuff. But I miss my guild, my friends, my server – and let’s face it, Book of Grudges is in no way as good as it was when I shared duties with Spinks and Hawley.

I am determined to keep an eye on WAR, I hope I enjoy my new server when I get back to playing there. It’s going to be a bit weird to make sure my friends (whose subs have run out) get to the same server. I’m not even sure it’s possible, so that will be seriously upsetting for all of us. I even got some great ideas for WAR blog posts at the pub gathering over the weekend. Those posts will be on Nerf the Cat, however. Not here.

Thanks to all for reading, commenting, visiting and keeping us in the feed-reader! It’s definitely appreciated.

It’s 6am. I woke at 5:30am. I went to bed at midnight, a bit awake for bed, but knowing I had to go. Because I have work today and need to leave the house at 7:30am to get there.

So why so tired?

Well.. first I signed up to a raid with my LotRO guild so I’d get a bit of practice in before Moria. It was fun, I didn’t get anyone killed and people were really nice and generous to have me along feeling a bit out of it. That finished at 10pm.

Now, when I last left WAR, Order on our side was fighting in Chaos Wastes, trying to flip it after a Herculean effort to flip Praag the day/night before. So I decided to pop on after LotRO and see what the status was. They were still fighting in Chaos Wastes (it started around 11am, just for reference), and there was a keep to be taken. So on I popped and joined one of the two warbands that were in the area. We took the southern keep, then a battlefield objective. Then our warband decided to go do some PQs to help with the zone flippage, leaving the others to re-capture any lost BOs on the way.

Off we went to the PQs. Did 1, then did another, then started on the first again. As we were reaching the end of stage 1 – the zone flipped. Not seen that before, but it was pretty cool, and people did genuinely cheer (even on Teamspeak – hang on, that was me!).

And the next thing we knew, I was learning the way to The Maw. We had 1 hour to try and capture it. First door, pretty easy. Second door, lots of problems getting a ram up, but we got it down. Didn’t see any defenders at all for that part and got a bit worried for poor ol’ Destruction. But seriously, we knew they were out there as we’d seen them valiantly fighting just moments before. We started off with the larger numbers and managed to get up some of the stairs intact, but we had problems with people having the right ward gear (unsurprisingly) and hey, it was our first attempt – so we were a bit all over the place.

We managed to make the fight last most of the hour, if not all of it, I stopped looking at the timer I have to admit. There were multiple waves of champion mobs that hit hard. Destruction had at least as many defenders as we had attackers by the end of it – which made for a pretty epic fight. There was lag, there were complete slowdowns, confusion, insanity and madness. But we were all along for the ride, and we all know it’s now going to happen again, on both sides.

As I left for bed, Order were off to try and defend Praag from the onslaught. One of the things about having that kind of fight, is you know all those players are on and spoiling for action. And a friday night – so noone has work the next day. Except me. Boo.

In other news, I notice Massively linked to my blog post that was pretty cynical about GOA at some point last night. So I thought I’d clarify – I think the odd bit of rhetoric can get action and make things change. I think if players shout loud enough things will get better there. I know GOA’s intention is not to stiff us and make us write such things. We now have a Realm War page (albeit in beta, but I’m guessing that’s because they wanted to get it out asap instead of stalling more – good work! I think we’d rather have it like this than not at all), we are having server transfers, communication has been a lot better – including Magnus stopping in at Ark’s Ark to comment on the Makaisson server transfer issue.

I’ve just seen it improve before and then go bad again. But I am hopeful that this may be the start of something good GOA-wise.

I’m also shattered because the RvR is so engaging I couldn’t just let it lie and not log on last night, and then I just couldn’t go to bed!

Poor work – they haven’t seen me this sleepy since I was killing a Balrog, and now they’ll all have to hear about The Maw.

We decided one of the ways to give you all a glimpse into the Roleplay server was to keep some anecdotes of RP episodes we’d enjoyed. Not giving conversations, but moments when we realised we were very happy with our server choice. So, here’s a few quick clips into life on the Roleplay server.

Today I had my first roleplaying encounter in game. I was up early and was polishing off a quest that needed me to kill some NPC witch elves in a Public Quest area. I saw another Archmage there too, so we teamed up. And when she joined the group, she greeted me with, “Hello, sister.” (No, it wasn’t Arbitrary.) We had a brief in character (IC) chat and then got on with the business of killing witch elves. It was going well so we went on to duo the second stage of that PQ before parting ways.

Fortunately it’s easy to RP a High Elf. Just be vaguely polite to other HElves, vaguely snotty to everyone else (to some of us this comes naturally), and no one minds if you use cheesy fantasy expressions and say ‘Aye’ instead of yes.

A couple of us hardy dwarf lasses were out fighting in Mount Bloodhorn, slaying Dog Soldiers left and right while scavenging their corpses and butchering their hounds. We were staying fairly in-character, except for me noting on guild chat that we looked like a pair of mini-Valkyries. But we did.

Along came a lone male dwarf a couple of ranks lower than us. He was bravely slaying bandits on his own, so with a hearty ‘hello’, we invited him to join in and participated in a little Dwarf Roleplay, mostly to do with death, destruction, gold and beer. I enjoyed it. It was just enough for me to feel part of the setting, but it didn’t stunt my ability to say I didn’t think we could do stage 2 of the PQ we were in. In fact, I just didn’t say it. And we got very very close to doing the stage!Another time, a group from the guild decided to tackle some Public Quests in Troll Country and we quickly got together a group to do so. As we started slaying the undead with great righteousness, we spotted another group. They hailed us in Sigmar’s name, and we quickly slipped into roleplay mode, from our usual chit-chat in-party. After rather easily completing the quest, the other group suggested we merge and go attack the local Destruction-held Keep. All in roleplay terms. In fact, just when a couple of us were asking privately how to describe some aspect in a roleplay way, one of the other group would manage it perfectly. Phrases that will stick in my mind for the next time I want to inject some in-character-ness to my RvR.